[Enhancement] MariaDB support in requirements

[robertsilen]

Hello, 

I found some external installation instructions that mention MariaDB: https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-install-mybb-forum-with-nginx-on-debian-10/

and I though it could make sense to add MariaDB to the requirements and installation page to make things clearer: 
https://docs.mybb.com/1.8/install/requirements/
https://docs.mybb.com/1.8/install/

I opened a github PR to update the mentioned files. There needs to be a version for MariaDB though in the requirements. Any idea what to put? 
https://github.com/mybb/docs.mybb.com/pull/205

and a PR for mybb's github README: 
https://github.com/mybb/mybb/pull/4809



What do you think?

[effone]

Appreciate your contribution.

[Omar G.]

Any idea what to put?

Maybe try the equivalent version of MariaDB compared to whatever version of MySQL is documented.

[robertsilen]

Thanks for comments. I updated the Pull Request to mention MySQL 5.0 and MariaDB 5.1 (the first version of MariaDB). Hope it gets approved and merged. Please give it a thumbs up in Github to support it

[robertsilen]

The Pull Request is now merged and the Requirements page now mentions both MySQL and MariaDB, great! However, under Recommendations it still mentions "Latest version of MySQL": https://docs.mybb.com/1.8/install/requirements/

Could the recommendation be changed to "Latest version of MariaDB" - what would be needed for MyBB to recommend MariaDB?

[Omar G.]

Could the recommendation be changed to "Latest version of MariaDB" - what would be needed for MyBB to recommend MariaDB?

https://mariadb.org/mariadb-10-11-is-lts/

I personally think it would be reasonable to "recommend" MariaDB over MySQL. I have no technical support for this, but base my opinion mostly from reading over quick search results.

Feel free to send (suggest) a Pull Request for MariDB 10.11 LTS, and while you are at it and if you feel like it, maybe update for PostgreSQL 13 and PHP 8.1. Neither PostgreSQL nor PHP seem to offer LTS releases, so I picked based on the EOL for each.

Regards.

[Devilshakerz]

We can have PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MariaDB - leaving out SQLite, which receives less attention due to number of users (and which was the reason for the original phrasing).

Feel free to send (suggest) a Pull Request for MariDB 10.11 LTS, and while you are at it and if you feel like it, maybe update for PostgreSQL 13 and PHP 8.1. Neither PostgreSQL nor PHP seem to offer LTS releases, so I picked based on the EOL for each.

Are there reasons for specific versions?

I don't believe there are major backward compatibility issues for database systems in core or plugins, so we can stick to generally recommending latest versions.

Regarding PHP, most compatibility problems in plugins appeared with PHP 8, so if a specific recommendation would already be within the 8.x line, we can generalize it to latest as well.

[Omar G.]

Are there reasons for specific versions?

The main reason being that we are recommending and I assume we won't be recommending no longer supported versions of any software.

But I see no issue with using latest and keep it simple as you suggest, either.

[robertsilen]

Thanks for comments, makes sense.
I made a Pull Request based on this: https://github.com/mybb/docs.mybb.com/pull/206
Cheers.